The United States has won more than 1,000 Olympic gold medals. It has produced 26 British Open champions, 14 No. 1 tennis players and two winners of the Tour de France. It is the birthplace of swimmer Michael Phelps, volleyball legend Karch Kiraly and chess master Bobby Fischer. An American nicknamed “the dump truck” nearly became the grand champion of sumo.
But there is one feat that this wealthy and populous nation has not achieved yet and, if recent events are any indication, will not achieve any time soon.
No American man has ever become a bona fide international soccer superstar.
Most potential arguments to the contrary have been dashed in recent weeks by the U.S. team’s ham-fisted performance at the Gold Cup, the regional championship it has won four times, most recently in 2007.
After opening with a limp 2-0 win over Canada, there was a lifeless 2-1 upset loss to Panama (the first ever for the US in the opening round) and a shame-inducing 1-0 squeaker against the fearsome force of Guadalupe (population 452,000).
These hideous flops were punctuated by the fact that the team’s best players, Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey, turned several easy scoring chances into the sorts of gaffes that might cause a junior player to be booed by his own parents. (No orange slices for you!)
The absence of a superstar will become even more glaring if the U.S. manages to make the Gold Cup final, where its likely opponent will be less-populous Mexico, a team led by the slick striker Javier Hernandez. Known as “Chicharito,” Hernandez has five goals in three Gold Cup games, which his team has won by a combined score of 14-1. He has emerged as a dazzling star on one of the world’s top club teams, Manchester United.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” television analyst Tommy Smyth said. “I go to my local park, and there’s 10 games going on all day on a Saturday, and you mean to tell me you can’t find one jewel in there?” After all, Smyth noted, his native country, Ireland, has produced plenty of top players (Shay Given and Roy Keane among them) even though it has a population of just six million.
The U.S. is quickly running out of excuses. One old line of defense was that there are not enough American kids playing. But with that number hovering at 15 million, that is no longer a reasonable point. Another argument is that sports like basketball, football and baseball hog the best American athletes — a notion that crumples at the feet of the world’s best player, Argentina’s Lionel Messi, who is barely 5-foot-7. Whatever deficiencies the U.S. soccer system has, its resources are surely deeper than those in Trinidad, the home of Manchester United’s Dwight Yorke, or Togo, the home of Real Madrid’s Emmanuel Adebayor. The same goes for Samuel Eto’o’s Cameroon and Didier Drogba’s Cote d’Ivoire.
“It’s befuddling,” according to Charlie Stillitano, the former Major League Soccer executive who now leads the soccer division at talent agency CAA. “You’d think just by chance alone, nature and God would have combined to produce that sort of thing.”
Perhaps the best American-born player is Giuseppe Rossi, who was raised in Clifton, New Jersey. But after he became one of the best youth players in the country, his Italian father decided his son’s best chance at a pro career was to move to Parma to train with that city’s youth club team.
Rossi, now 24, plays for Villareal in Spain’s La Liga and has scored 93 goals as a professional. Rossi turned down several chances to play for the U.S. national team. He chose Italy instead, and has reportedly drawn interest from Barcelona.
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